Quick Tip: Create a Table of Contents Using Note Links

Note Links allow you to associate your notes with each other, helping you create a customized organization structure inside your Evernote account. You can learn more about using Note Links by reading this blog post.

Note Links are great for linking together different pieces of travel-related information like itineraries, articles and passport photos, as well as organizing project elements and class research. One of the coolest things you can do with Note Links is create a table of contents for a set of notes inside of a notebook. This is particularly useful if you are sharing a notebook with other individuals.

To do this:

Grab the Note Link to a note by right-clicking on the note and selecting to Copy Note Link.

Create a New Note in your notebook or go to a note where you’d like that Note Link to go.

Paste the link (it will show up as the hyperlinked title of your note) into your New Note or existing note.

Do this for all other notes you’d like to include in your table of contents, putting them in the order that you’d like people to look through the notebook.

You can perform this as a batch action, too. Select multiple notes, right click and then add them to your new or existing note.

I’m using Note Links as part of a GTD (Getting Things Done) system, so whenever I have a task that I need to link to “more info” or whatever, I’ll include the note link in that task. Same thing can be done with e-mails in Apple Mail.app, like explained here:
http://techpatio.com/2012/apple/mac-osx/mac-apple-mail-app-message-url-applescript

I use a similar approach, linking to Evernote notes within my outlook task as I’m working on them. Then, when I’ve completed the task, I save the task to Evernote using the Outlook integration and a unique tag. This allows me to find an archive of my completed tasks in Evernote that has links to all the background information and additional details about each item.

I have begun using the Note links extensively to set up index notes as explained by Grumpy Monkey in the forum..very useful…I have an index card for each client and each time I add a note I copy the note link to the index card…great time saver

We have in internal bug on file for this, but it appears to be very hard to track down. I encourage you to file a support request so we can find out more information about your exact setup to see if there’s something specific causing it on your machine.

I had the same problem so I typed in the heading I wanted and added the link to the text. In the process of doing this, it began working the way the blog tip indicated, ie the title of the note is pasted and not the link. Got no idea how that happened, but it works as the tip suggests.

After working with EN support for the past two weeks, I sent them the following:

Good news to report: After installing your latest pre-release this morning I tested the Copy Note Links feature. I was able to select multiple notes, select CNL, create a new note, and paste THE TITLES (not the URLs) in the new note.

So far so good. Will let you know if it gets buggy again. You can probably close this ticket.

Thanks so much for whatever you did. This is a really useful functionality that EN power users or anyone with high-volume notebooks will want to use.

I have two tables of contents: one for work and one for home. I stick commonly used files into the table of contents and it saves a ton of time. For quick access, I made a notebook called “Contents” with only the tables of contents in it. I also put a copy of the TOCs in the Favorites Bar on my Mac’s Evernote app, for quick access.

This is a great tip. I like to create tables of contents for different categories of notes. I tag each on with an “index” tag to easily find it later. So whether I’m looking for a list of design resources about, say, bezier curves or keeping track of a complex project at work, I can reach all the notes easily.

When I first tried this, this is the thing that changed Evernote for me forever in business. In my client transactions I can now add in contracts and notes and emails and then link them all to the one main note I have for each client. This is gold!

You can also add these links just like normal links, applied to some text you’ve already written.

I do this sometimes as a transformational thing – I’ll grab a bunch of links of stuff I’m interested in and put them in a note. Later I review them and probably save about half as clipped Evernote pages. I can then go back to my original index and change the original URL links to the Note Links, just with the Edit Link command as if I was correcting a URL.

The only slightly bizarre aspect to this is that setting note links as a link like this will colour them the blue of normal URLs, rather than the green if you paste the link as in the article.

Notice: This Note Link feature has a bug and does not work on some Windows computers.

April 10 – email response from Evernote Support:

“I see there is a bug on file for this – I’m sorry to say we currently don’t have an update for you at this time. Thank you for reporting the issue, and we hope that it will be fixed in an upcoming release.”

Just to echo a couple of the other comments, I tend to use my iPad a lot to get myself organized, but right now I don’t have a way of getting a note link from the native iPad app. That means when I’m updating my To-Do’s, I have to go back to my laptop to include a reference to Evernote. (ugggh I can’t believe you just made me get off the couch…)

I didn’t know about it till I saw this and its been a real help since. I manage a fleet of about 90 vehicles and do separate notes for each one and also for any damage. I can now link the “damage” note to the main vehicle note.

This sounds really great. But what am I doing wrong? I created a Table of Contents (with a list of notelinks), and then I put the note into a public shared folder, hoping that whoever viewed the folder could access the links.

I’m assuming that they can’t see the links because they’re just viewing (rather than joining) the folder — is that correct?

If so…

Is there a way that I can share publicly a group of notes from Evernote via URL or email? I know that you can just select several notes and then email them to someone, but I don’t like how they display — note after note. I’d rather have the person view them as links. Is this possible?

When a parent note containing a link to another child note is shared, and the parent note is accessed by someone else via the web, can the child note’s link to changed from evernote:// protocol to http:// protocol in some way? (this would mean that the child notes should automatically be shared too, with ample warning beforehand if you didn’t intend this.)

Is there any way to link to sections within a note? Some of my course notes are quite long so it would be nice to link to the subheadings within notes from other notes and also to provide a list of contents at the top of the note to all the sub-headings within it.

Is there any way to link to sections within a note? Some of my course notes are quite long so it would be nice to link to the subheadings within notes from other notes and also to provide a list of contents at the top of the note to all the sub-headings within it.

How hard would it be to add a link back to the Table of Contents at the end of every note that has just been added to the Table of Contents? Automatically of course.
I’ve been doing it manually, so I can easily flip back and forth, or search for a note and easily find the rest of the grouped/related notes via the Table to Contents.